Journey across the Four Seas: A Chinese Woman's Search for Home

by Li, Veronica

  I gave him my fullest attention, but the harder I listened, the less I understood. If my Mandarin were bad, the colonel’s was closer to Russian than any form of Chinese. Not one single word registered in my brain. When I stepped up to the mike, I truly had no clue whatsoever about what he’d said. I stared down at the sea of eyes staring at me. Two options came to my mind: run or give a speech, any speech. My lips parted and out spewed the propaganda I’d often translated: "friendship between the Chinese and American peoples," "the common fight against aggression," "striving for freedom, independence, and justice," and so on and so forth. When I finished, the hall broke into rowdy applause. The GIs whistled and whooped and shouted for more. The colonel, who had no idea what I’d said, was impressed, while the GIs, who had no idea what the colonel had said, were impressed as well. One American soldier came up to me and said, "If China had more people like you, the Japanese would surrender without a fight." I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but he had a friendly grin on his face, so I took it as a compliment.

  Even though people congratulated me, I felt no glory. I was only relieved to bluff through this task without adverse consequences. Interpretation was a deadly serious job. Whenever I had to translate information concerning the warfront, a tragic incident always lingered on my mind. This happened when the Chinese intelligence received information that a squadron of Japanese planes was headed for Kweilin. The interpreter passed the message on to the Americans, but in his translation he made one error. Instead of thirty Japanese fighters, he reported thirteen. The Americans sent fifteen planes to intercept, only to find themselves surrounded by a force twice as strong. The interpreter was arrested and executed. It was a chilling lesson for all translators.

  Right after the national day celebrations, the colonel began traveling frequently. Working with his closest staff, I learned what he was up to. Japanese troops were advancing westward. If the Nationalists failed to stop the enemy, they would have to retreat further. The ancient capital of Sian had been chosen the next wartime capital. Colonel Wong was one of those planning the relocation, and therefore had to visit the site regularly.

  As soon as the colonel returned from a trip, I received a most unusual command from him. His secretary, Miss Chan, was the one who conveyed it to me. She said that the colonel wanted me to accompany him on his trips. As it wouldn’t look right to have a woman in cheongsam at his heels, I was to put on an Air Force uniform.

  I looked at Miss Chan, dumbfounded. How could I, a single woman, travel with a man? Any man would be scandalous, but this one was a notorious womanizer!

  "He’s attending a conference in Chungking now. When he comes back in two weeks, he expects you to be in uniform and ready to travel. I’m very sorry," Miss Chan said with pity in her eyes. She knew all too well what the assignment would do to me. It would ruin my life.

  I had to think quickly. That night, I wrote my resignation letter and started to pack my belongings. Quitting my job wasn’t enough, for the colonel could always knock on my door. Although he couldn’t coerce a civilian to obey him, he was a forceful man used to getting his way.

  I handed my resignation to the colonel’s deputy. He was a staid, sensible man who was old enough to be my father. I told him outright that it would be "inconvenient" for a single woman to travel with the colonel. Being a man, he understood very well what the "inconvenience" was.

  To bolster my case, I gave another important reason—my responsibilities to my family. The Air Force was paying me enough to feed myself, but from next month on I would have two more mouths to feed. They were Ngai, who had recovered and gone back to school, and Sam-Koo, who was making her way from Macau to join me. I needed to find a higher-paying position. A Hong KongUniversity friend, Yolanda, had written to me about the opportunities in Chungking. She was working at the British embassy and had promised to help me get in. I laid out my reasoning with the confidence of a person telling the truth, because I was. Although finding a better job had been on my mind, I would have taken my time if the colonel hadn’t given me the impossible order.

  After hearing me out, the deputy expressed his sympathy and agreed to release me. He also arranged to fly me to Chungking on an Air Force plane.

  *

  If the entire truth had to be told, I had a third reason to leave Chengtu. For months I’d corresponded faithfully with Yang, who was in training in India. He described to me the harshness of life at boot camp: waking up at the crack of dawn for workouts, running up mountains with heavy gear on his back, dodging bullets that couldn’t kill but could hurt. All these exercises were carried out in the oppressive Indian heat. Many of his comrades had collapsed from heat stroke, while others had contracted malaria, dysentery, and other horrible diseases. Whenever his letter failed to arrive within the expected interval, I would worry myself sick about his safety. His silent spells seemed to be getting longer and longer.

  One day while I was at lunch with Miss Chan in the mess hall, an officer came over to our table. He and the secretary behaved like friends who hadn’t seen each other for a while. I didn’t pay much heed to their chitchat, but when he mentioned India, my ears grew long.

  "The training camps are in total disarray. Management is so poor you can say there’s no management at all. The result is thousands of young men sitting around idle. So what do they do? They go around looking for entertainment. Whoring, gambling, drinking, and smoking—there’s nothing they don’t do. If we have to depend on them to save the country, we might as well raise our hands and surrender."

  The officer mentioned the four vices in one breath, as though they were equal in sinfulness. To me, three of them could be overlooked, but the first one, whoring, was unforgivable.

  "It’s only a minority doing this, not everyone, right?" I couldn’t help asking.

  The officer looked at me, as if just noticing my presence. "The camp has turned into a nest of snakes and rats. Even an immortal can’t stay clean. How can a person help it, when his companions and even his commander are behaving like that? If I had a daughter, I wouldn’t let her near any of them."

  That night I wrote to Yang, repeating what the officer had told me. "Whoring, gambling, drinking, and smoking, which one of these vices are you guilty of?"

  His reply turned around shortly. "I confess to having done a bit of gambling and drinking," he wrote. "As for whoring, I swear I’ve never touched the women here. It’s true that many of my companions have, but not I."

  His words sounded hollow to me. It was safe to admit to gambling and drinking. After all, they were normal pastimes for men. No man, however, would admit to whoring to his girlfriend. I pulled out his old letters and reread them—no time for anything but train and sleep, sleep and train. What a bunch of lies. To think of the tears I’d wasted on the scoundrel! Now that my eyes had been opened, they could see the deception oozing between the lines of honeyed script; it put into doubt everything he’d told me. Was his father really a professor? Was I really his one and only girlfriend? Had he really kept himself clean? How could I ever trust him again?

  Several times I picked up my pen to write him, but the affection that had made the ink flow had been replaced by doubts. I was twenty-six going on twenty-seven. In two or three years, provided that the war was over by then, he would be a different person and so would I. Could we pick up where we left off? And if we couldn’t, who else would be interested in an old woman like me? The more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that this was the best time for a clean break. Once I moved to Chungking, he would have no way of contacting me. I put away my pen and paper and resolved never to write him again.

  TAPE FIVE

  MAKING A BAD PEACE

  1

  Chungking is located at the confluence of two major rivers, the Yangtze and Chia-Ling. A ring of mountains traps in the moisture, making the air insufferably humid year- round. In the cool months of October to April, the humidity condenses into a heavy mist that blankets the city. The residents often couldn
’t see the sky for days, but neither could the Japanese bombers in the sky see them. The fog was a natural defense, a good reason for the Nationalists to pick Chungking to be their wartime capital.

  When I returned to the city in 1944, Japanese air strikes had stopped. The fog had blocked some of them, but it took an American called General Chennault and his crew of Flying Tigers to end the attacks altogether. Evidence of previous air raids, however, was everywhere. The charred remains of buildings were left standing, and horror stories of bombs falling on shelters and killing thousands were subjects of everyday conversations. But just as it brought calamity, war also brought opportunity. Chungking, formerly a regional hub, had turned into a global center teeming with government officials from all over the country and the world.

  For an English speaker like myself, a foreign legation was my employer of choice. The salaries they paid were several times that of my own government. But like everything else in China, you couldn’t get a foot in the door without connections. Yolanda, who’d found employment with the British Information Service through a Hong Kong liaison, told me about a vacancy for a translator in her office. I filled out the application she brought me and submitted it.

  Yolanda also asked me to share a room with her. She’d been no buddy of mine while we were both studying economics at Hong KongUniversity. Everything about her had rubbed me the wrong way. She was loud, especially in blowing her own horn, and hence her nickname—"Number One Under the Sky." She was also a shameless flirt. I suppose some men found her unChinese features attractive. She had large round eyes, long lashes, a tall nasal bridge like a gweilo’s, and an olive complexion. Although both parents claimed to be pure Chinese, the gossip was that a few drops of Portuguese or Indian blood had been injected somewhere along the line.

  Two years had passed since I last saw her. Our lives were no longer the same—we were no longer the same. The Yolanda of yesteryear, the daughter of a wealthy realtor, would deem me unworthy of her sidelong glances. The Yolanda of today was not only willing to help me get into the embassy network, but also to share her room with me. I was most happy to accept, considering that the only other alternative was living at the hostel with other homeless women. There was an extreme shortage of housing in Chungking because of the sudden influx of government workers and refugees.

  Yolanda’s room was above a government-owned bookstore where her fiancé used to work. He was a naval officer and was away on training in the U.S. Yolanda made it a point to explain to me that when the two of them had been living together in the room, she’d slept in the bed while he’d bunked on a canvas cot. She must have taken me for a three-year-old to believe that story. In any case, whatever she did with him was her own business. She didn’t have to explain so much.

  The room was small but adequate. There was also a stove right outside where we could cook simple meals—at last, Cantonese dishes free of Szechwanese spices. The only problem concerned the other end—the toilet. There was no bathroom, not even an outhouse. When my face fell, Yolanda said this was the standard fare in a typical Chinese house. Having lived only in the dorm and hostels, I’d been spared this experience. Yolanda, who was already an old hand, taught me how. Urination was to be done in a chamber pot, after which I was to empty it by tossing its contents into the alley below. I should look before I toss, she cautioned. I heeded her advice diligently in the beginning, but after a while I grew lax, once with hazardous consequence for the passerby. I ducked before he could see me, so I didn’t know whether he got showered or not. For more serious business, Yolanda took me to her office at the British embassy. As she couldn’t bring me too often or people might start questioning, I had to hold it in—sometimes up to a week.

  While waiting for word on my application, I went to visit a Szechwanese friend. Chungking, built on a mountain, was a city of slopes and winding streets. To get to her home, I had to climb a long, steep alley. To my disappointment, my friend wasn’t home. As I turned to leave, I saw a familiar face struggling up the street. It was Wai-Jing, the woman Renee and I had met while checking out the Chilu dorm. A native of Canton, she’d jumped to embrace us when she’d overheard us speaking in Cantonese. Since then, we’d come to know each other quite well. She was dating a student at WestChinaUniversity, and whenever it was too late for her to return to her own dorm, she would stay over with me. What a coincidence to be running into her in Chungking! We clasped hands and within a minute were caught up with each other’s news. She was teaching at a secondary school in Chungking, and I told her I was waiting to hear from the British Information Service.

  "I know somebody who can help you," she said with her usual enthusiasm. "The father of my fiancé can write you a letter of recommendation."

  Wai-Jing went on to explain that her future father-in-law was the general manager of Commercial Press, the largest publishing house in China. His name was Wang Yun-Wu, but she called him Lo Bak, a respectful address that means "Old Uncle." Aside from being a publisher, he was also a member of the National Assembly, a scholar, writer, brush calligrapher, and inventor. She really got excited at the mention of his "four corners" dictionary, a revolutionary method of organizing Chinese characters by number. While I would agree that it was more efficient than the traditional radicals and strokes method, I would never go as far as hailing it as the single most important innovation to modernize the Chinese language, as Wai-Jing was calling it. But then Wai-Jing was Wai-Jing. She loved to exaggerate. Her nickname was "Ah Fei"—To Fly—for her ability to jabber as fast as an airplane on a runway, at the end of which she would take off into the heavens.

  She carried on about Lo Bak, even describing his mansion on WongMountain. The house used to belong to a French ambassador who was famous for the parties he threw. The view from the living room made her feel like an angel looking down from heaven. Even Chiang Kai-Shek had set up a home farther up the mountain. His house was much grander, of course, although she’d never been inside.

  My ears were aching from fatigue when I heard her say, "My fiancé is home on holiday and I’m going up to see him. Why don’t you come spend the weekend with us?"

  I laughed. With all her good intentions, my friend was talking out of turn. How could she invite me to a home that wasn’t hers? Wai-Jing, however, insisted that Lo Bak wouldn’t mind. She also pointed out that the visit would give me the opportunity to ask him for a letter of recommendation. Her suggestion hit on my heart’s strongest desire. The job with the British meant the end of all my headaches, and I would do anything to get it. I accepted Wai-Jing’s invitation without further argument.

  On Saturday afternoon we went to Commercial Press to catch a ride with Lo Bak. Wai-Jing took me into a room through a side door. Inside was a single bed, an ordinary wooden desk and chair, and shelves upon shelves of books. This, I was told, was where the general manager of the country’s biggest publishing house slept during weekdays. Wai-Jing sat down on the bed and patted the mattress on the spot meant for me. Before long the door flew open and a man in a Chinese robe rustled in. He was a short man but with a large presence. He was round all over—his head was like a honeydew melon and his belly was that of a woman in her sixth month of pregnancy. His eyes were small and hooded, and I could feel their sharp rays darting at me. Wai-Jing introduced me as a good friend. In a booming voice Lo Bak welcomed me. I bowed reverently.

  "Miss Li, I heard you’re from Hong Kong," Lo Bak said once we were settled in the back of his limousine. He had the robust voice of an orator, but his Cantonese was tainted with the quaint accent of a peasant who’d never left his village. According to Wai-Jing, his ancestral home was in Chungshan County of Kwangtung province, but he himself was born and bred in Shanghai.

  I replied that yes, I was from Hong Kong, and that was I a graduate of Hong KongUniversity. Immediately he exclaimed, "Good university!" Encouraged by his approval, I went on to give him a résumé of my work experience. All this time his index finger was drawing squiggles on his lap. It was later explained t
o me that he had a habit of scribbling Chinese characters on any surface at his fingertips. His brilliant mind was so active that it gave him no rest.

  After a long ride up a tortuous mountain road, the car stopped at the entrance to a dirt path. We got out and went on foot in the shade of towering bamboo groves. The climate up here was much cooler than the lowland. A sweet fragrance filled the air. I looked around but couldn’t see anything that would give out such perfume. As we got closer to the mansion, the scent got stronger. We went through a gate and climbed a few steps up to a terrace.

  The sight took my breath away. This was where the fragrance was coming from! In front of me lay an encyclopedia of roses of every variety and color you can imagine. Yellow, pink, red, even black; hybrids, classics, climbers, bushes, you name it. The flowers were enormous, as if they were holding a competition to determine which were the biggest. It was August, the peak of the blooming season.

  Much as I would like to be demure, I couldn’t help myself that day. My jaw dropped and my eyes bulged as Wai-Jing ushered me into the main room. An image of European ladies in flouncy gowns and gentlemen in tails flitted before me. I imagined the furniture swept aside and elegant couples waltzing on the expansive floor. They were gliding above the clouds, in the embrace of a majestic jade-green mountain range. For once Wai-Jing hadn’t been exaggerating. The place was as grand as she’d described, both inside and out.